Civil Rights and Political Human Rights: Contesting Human Rights Failures within the Minimally Democratic State

Allen Buchanan argues that democracy ought to be added to the list of basic human rights, but he limits the conception of democracy to a minimum of electoral representation within the nation state, effectively collapsing human rights into civil rights. This, however, leaves him unable to address the problem of human rights failures occurring within established states that meet his standard of minimal democratic representation. In order to address this problem, I appeal to James Bohman's conception of the political human rights of all members of humanity, as opposed to the civil rights of the citizens of particular states. I argue that while this provides the basis on which to address the problem of human rights failures within minimally democratic states, Bohman's conception also entails the potential for deep tensions to arise between the different claims of civil and human rights.     

Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.     

The Voting Rights Act and Black Registration in Mississippi

The impact of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) on black registrationin Mississippi was dramatic. Black registration increased from28,500 in 1965 to 406,000 in 1984. The influence of the VRAon black registration, however, varied across Mississippi counties.The impact of the VRA was especially evident in counties havinga large number of unregistered blacks. The presence of a largenumber of unregistered blacks apparently stimulated a high levelof civil rights activity, which then provoked federal intervention.Nevertheless, blacks are registered at lower rates than whites;blacks are less likely to vote than whites; and blacks are lesslikely than whites to be elected to public office.     

Race,Representation, and the Voting Rights Act

Despite wide scholarly interest in the Voting Rights Act, surprisingly little is known about how its specific provisions affected Black political representation. In this article, we draw on theories of electoral accountability to evaluate the effect of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, on the representation of Black interests in the 86th to 105th congresses. We find that members of Congress who represented jurisdictions subject to the preclearance requirement were substantially more supportive of civil rights–related legislation than legislators who did not represent covered jurisdictions. Moreover, we report that the effects were stronger when Black voters composed larger portions of the electorate and in more competitive districts. This result is robust to a wide range of model specifications and empirical strategies, and it persists over the entire time period under study. Our findings have especially important implications given the Supreme Court's recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder.     

The Democratic Peace is Not Democratic: On Behalf of Rawls' Decent Societies

In The Law of Peoples , John Rawls defends the claim that 'decent' societies (non-liberal, non-democratic constitutional republics) deserve full and good standing in the international community. His defense of decent societies consists of two main arguments. First, he argues that the basic human right to political participation does not imply a right to democratic political institutions. This argument has been thoroughly discussed by commentators. Second, he argues that decent societies, if admitted to the international community, would pose no special threat to the stability of that community. This argument has largely been ignored. My aim in this article is to analyze this second argument, which I call the 'peace argument'.     

The Voting Rights Act and Hispanic Political Representation in the Southwest

Extensions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1970 and 1975 expandedcoverage to the southwestern United States and included provisionsfor non-English speaking minorities. In the South, the VRA hadthe effect of increasing the number of black voters and electedofficials. In this article, we examine the changes in numbersof Mexican American and other Hispanic elected officials inthe five southwestern states for federal, state, and local officesduring the eleven-year period of 1973–1984. Gains occurredduring the period, although they were uneven across the statesand for different types of offices. The VRA served to removethe more blatant obstacles to electoral participation, but thelaw's fullest impact has also required effective political mobilizationby Hispanic organizations to increase voter registration andproduce a conducive environment for Hispanics to seek and winelective positions.     

Citizenship and Voting Rights: Should Resident Aliens Vote?

The disenfranchisement of non-citizens in democratic governments is close to universal. In this article this state of affairs is critically examined from the vantage point of the meaning of the democratic criterion of inclusion. The major difficulty for any such endeavour is the apparent vagueness and ambiguity of that criterion. Two distinct interpretations are distinguished, the principle of membership and the all affected principle. The argument is made that only the all affected principle provides a coherent account of who should be included in the demos. More importantly, the observation is made that on any reasonable interpretation of the “all affected” the right to vote in national elections for resident aliens follows. Thus, the current practice of exclusion is found to be fundamentally at odds with the basic understanding of the democratic idea.     

The Voting Rights Act in North Carolina: An Evaluation

This study evaluates the impact of the Voting Rights Act onthe black electorate in North Carolina. A quasi-experimentalresearch design compares progress made in the forty countiescovered by the act (the experimental counties) with an equivalentgroup not covered by the act (the control counties). The resultsindicate that blacks in the experimental counties have madesignificant gains in registering voters, electing black officials,and improving their social and economic conditions.     

Rethinking Human Rights in York as a Human Rights City

Human rights is in crisis in the UK. It lacks significant political backing and public support. This ‘insider account’ of York becoming a human rights city suggests that there is a need to rethink approaches to human rights. The article looks at the strategies adopted in the city; the annual city‐based indicator report which provides the key reference point for all local activities; and the declaration of York as a ‘human rights city’ in 2017 alongside its subsequent impact. The discussion is linked to two debates within human rights: how to define and build a culture of human rights, and what it means for human rights to be truly relevant at a local level. The new approach advocated can be summarised as participatory, locally informed, and related to everyday concerns.     

Racial Inequality in Democratic Accountability: Evidence from Retrospective Voting in Local Elections

One important and, to date, overlooked component of democratic accountability is the extent to which it might exacerbate existing societal inequalities if the outcomes for some groups of citizens are prioritized over others when voters evaluate governmental performance. We analyze a decade of California school board elections and find evidence that voters reward or punish incumbent board members based on the achievement of white students in their district, whereas outcomes for African American and Hispanic students receive comparatively little attention. We then examine public opinion data on the racial education achievement gap and report results from an original list experiment of California school board members that finds approximately 40% of incumbents detect no electoral pressure to address poor academic outcomes among racial minority students. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for several scholarly literatures, including retrospective voting, racial inequality in political influence, intergovernmental policymaking, and education politics.     

Human Rights and Sovereignty in the ASEAN Path Towards a Human Rights Declaration

Sovereignty and non-interference principles are trademarks of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional approach. Starting from 1993, ASEAN has been developing a process aimed at creating a human rights system. This process reached its acme in August 2013 when the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD) was formally launched. In the frame of the tension between sovereignty and human rights, the paper firstly analyzes the roots of the ASEAN path towards the creation of the regional human rights system grounded on the Vienna World Conference debate. Next comes an analysis of the political commitments assumed by ASEAN in the last 20 years in the process of creating a human rights body in the region. Furthermore, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of the most problematic issues connected with the nature, functions, mandate, and purposes of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Human Rights Commission (2009). This is followed by an analysis of the AHRD.     

Cognitive Heterogeneity and Economic Voting: A Comparative Analysis of Four Democratic Electorates

This article examines the cognitive foundations of economic voting in four diverse democratic electorates: Canada, Hungary, Mexico, and Taiwan. We present a theory of heterogeneous attribution, where an individual's level of political sophistication conditions his or her ability to attribute responsibility for economic conditions to governmental actors. In contrast to previous literature, we argue that higher, not lower, levels of political sophistication prompt citizens to "vote their pocketbook." Using data from surveys done in conjunction with recent elections in all of these countries, we find that more politically sophisticated respondents are more likely to make use of pocketbook evaluations in their decisions to support or oppose the incumbent government. These findings both present a significant challenge to the conventional wisdom on political sophistication and economic voting and shed light on the necessary cognitive preconditions for democratic accountability.     

The Voting Rights Act and Louisiana: Twenty Years of Enforcement

This article examines the interaction of structural change (lawsaffecting voting rights) and cultural continuities (differencesbetween the Protestant and black Catholic political cultures)on the level and quality of black political participation inLouisiana. Blacks who at mid-century resided in the French-Catholicparishes were more likely to register and vote than blacks wholived outside these parishes. The advent of the Voting RightsAct has radically changed this pattern. Northern parishes havingthe highest proportion of black population, the highest landtenancy rates, and a tradition of a plantation economy are nowamong the parishes exhibiting the highest rates of black voterregistration.     

Human Rights in Kosovo

The emotions surrounding the question of Kosovo’s future owe their intensity to the long history of human rights abuses in the province. The years 1945–1966 and 1987–1999, in particular, saw harsh repression of local Albanians and a systematic favoring of local Serbs. Since June 1999, the province has been under international supervision, and, in this period, Serbs complain that they have been the victims of repeated acts of violence at the hands of Albanians. This article provides an overview of human rights abuses since 1945 and closes with a brief assessment of the international plan presented by UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari in February 2007.